The present invention relates to the field of media objects or “assets” (e.g., digital images, sound, video, and/or other media objects) and, more particularly, to system and methodology for efficient management of such media assets.
In today's e-commerce environment, fundamental problems exist in terms of how to track what activity users are doing, when they did that activity, and how long they did it for. Thus, for example, in the instance where a user has uploaded a photo (i.e., digital image) from a wireless device and shared that photo with other users, or performed an e-commerce transaction based on that photo, cost considerations are associated with the wireless infrastructure and back-end infrastructure necessary for supporting those activities. Also, in an e-commerce transaction, often a multi-party deal occurs between the carrier or cell phone manufacturer or the back-end provider—that is, the e-commerce “partners.” Any transaction associated with wireless- and wireline-connected devices must generate a transaction-based revenue order for that transaction item in order to properly bill the end user, as well as properly allocate the costs associated with a given transaction. Accordingly, the problem arises as to how does one accurately track e-commerce and other online activities in order to allocate the cost and revenues associated with each transaction. This problem—about how to best track information about what users did and when—is particularly difficult when media assets, such as digital photographic images, are involved, as those assets are easily passed among various users online, each user of which may interact with a particular online vendor or “e-commerce partner.”
There have been some attempts to address specific areas of this problem, but to date the approaches have only provided piecemeal support; no end-to-end solution has emerged. For instance, wireless operators can capture and track how long a user uses a cell phone device or how long a wireless data call lasted. In more general terms, wireless carriers can track information with respect to a given user session at the core transport layer (i.e., how long the call lasted), but they cannot track at the application layer—that is, track which particular features or areas of functionality were used, particularly in connection with a specific object (e.g., media object) of a particular user. For example, if a user made a wireless data call to send fifteen e-mails connecting to that user's company email service, the wireless carrier or operator is not able to track how many emails were sent over its wireless network. Instead, the carrier is only able to track the transmission session, in other words, just the transmission start and end times. As a result, the carrier is only able to bill the customer based on air time of the data service, thus preventing the carrier from exploring other revenue models, such as employing a pricing scheme based on a number of emails sent, number of bytes transmitted, or the like.
As another example, from the Internet, Web site operators have tracked user interaction in terms of when a particular user logs in and logs out. Additionally, operators may track session-specific information, such as which pages a user visited (or did not visit), based on user demographic information. Commonly, this information can be stored as a small text file (“cookie”) at the user's own computer. This type of information provides an understanding of the usage scenario and the behavior of the user, but is not particularly useful for generating a billing document. Additionally, users often block cookie-based tracking information, due to concerns about user privacy. All told, while cookie-based tracking information is useful for gleaning user preferences, it does not provide an effective approach for generating information that is suitable for creating an appropriate billing document based on the user's activities that employ different vendor services for media-based objects or assets.
Increasingly, communication services—both wireless- and wireline-based—are being employed for transmitting a variety of media types. For example, with ever-increasing interest in digital photography, both wireless- and wireline-enabled devices are being employed for uploading photos to Internet-based computers, where the digital photographs may be shared and/or further processed. Other media types commonly transmitted by users include audio (e.g., MP3) and video (e.g., MPEG) media types. With ever-increasing bandwidth becoming available, this trend can only be expected to increase. As a result, there is great interest in creating a solution that allows vendors to provide users with enhanced services for supporting and processing different media types of interest to users, but does so with a viable e-commerce business model. What is needed is an asset management or tracking system providing methodologies that allow vendors to track specific user activities on a per-object, per-vendor basis, including tracking metrics providing information about services used other than just connection time. The present invention fulfills this and other needs.